The Orange Pi Zero is one hell of an SBC. It has served as a Wi-Fi access point for months without issues and as a testbed for playing around with MySQL.

I wanted it to be a useful device again, but had trouble finding an use case for it due to its hardware limitations. After messing around with my amateur archival work, I had accumulated some data that might be worth keeping around. Due to my network being quite unreliable and slow, I decided to go with torrents as the main distribution method. I could have just hosted the torrents on my main server box, which is what I later did anyway, but then I realized that hosting torrents is a workload that a weak machine could handle just as well.

I took a board that was left over from a shelf, grabbed some twine and nails and banged together this monstrosity:

The setup in all its glory.
The setup in all its glory.
This setup originally had two 4TB hard drives. Unfortunately one of them was too faulty for even BTRFS to handle.
This setup originally had two 4TB hard drives. Unfortunately one of them was too faulty for even BTRFS to handle.

This brave little machine runs on Armbian and hosts one Transmission instance. This instance is a mirror for some of the data that I collect as part of my archival effort. The OS lives on a 120GB Crucial SSD with the help of the nand-sata-install script that Armbian provides, and the data lives on one 4TB Seagate hard drive that is somehow still working.

The board is pressed against the metal part of an AMD AM4 socket stock cooler with the help of a thick 5mm thermal pad and solid copper wires taken from an electrical cable. This looks very janky, but the cooling performance is absolutely fantastic: 30C when idling and not more than 50-60C under the heaviest workloads.

The total power consumption of this setup is typically between the 5-10W range, which isn’t the lowest, but still acceptable. The CPU is a 32-bit one, so let’s see if this board can make it to 2038.

All in all, it was just another server on the wall.
All in all, it was just another server on the wall.

2021-04-02 update

The 4TB Seagate HDD decided to start a career in experimental music production and started clicking and not showing up when connected to a PC. And thus, the seedbox on a wall has been put on pause for now.